Quote:
Originally Posted by Apache
Gray Marketing goes on all the time in the US Jewelry Business. You might be surprised by how many big name corporate stores do this. Watches are the worst. For example, Seiko gives a 3 year warranty. One year is world wide and the other two years is good only in the country it was manufactured for. You buy a gray market Seiko that has the Day/Date's second language as Spanish or Arabic (the most common) and you would have to send it to the original country for warranty repair. And be especially careful when buying cheaper name brand watches off the Internet.
Apache
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That's painting far too bleak a picture of grey market watch sales. I'm sure there shops which will sell you watches with Arabic, Chinese or any other language dials and refer you to the original country for warranty repair, but there are a large number of grey market dealers offering their own warranties which match the ones you get when buying your watch from an authorised source. Personally I've bought almost all my watches this way and have never had any problems.
Where watches are concerned, grey market sales are in any case a phenomenon entirely of the manufacturers' own making. Many, or most, "high end" manufacturers demand that a shop or dealer buy a minimum amount of watches, regardless of its ability to sell that number. Hence the only way for a small independent watch shop to be able to carry, say, Breitling watches, is to buy the minimum amount, keep the ones it thinks it can sell and sell the others on to a grey market dealer at cost or a minimal profit.
Pardon the OT.